Coletti steps down as EHS boys coach

Jason Coletti, shown here talking to his team during a timeout this season, has stepped down as Ephrata boys basketball coach.

Ephrata boys basketball Coach Jason Coletti has announced he is stepping down after four seasons at the helm. Coletti announced his decision to his players last Thursday at the season-ending team banquet.

In his four years, Coletti guided the Mounts to a 23-65 overall record and was just 4-18 this season which placed the Mounts in fifth place in Section Two.

Reached Tuesday afternoon, Coletti said he felt it was just the right time to move on.

“Four years, we put in a lot of time,” he said. “When you take over a rebuilding project, one that hasn’t won for quite a while, it takes a lot of time and energy. I’m just ready to move on. Sometimes you just know inside that it’s time for somebody else to probably take over and move on to other opportunities that might be coming for myself.”

Coletti took over a 1-21 team when he arrived four years ago after spending six seasons as a successful girls coach at Manheim Central. The program gradually did see improvement under his watch, although that sometimes didn’t translate into wins and losses. Ephrata went 3-19, 5-17, 11-11 and 4-18 under his lead and never reached the post-season.

This past season, the Mounts entered the year with just two players with any significant varsity time. And while they couldn’t put many wins together, they were competitive on most nights.

“We went through the scores of games from the second time through our section and almost every game came down to the last possession,” Coletti said. “We had CV literally down to the last possession, Lebanon down to the last possession… Solanco was double overtime and we had the last shot, E-town was overtime and came down to the last possession…We were right there. It reminded me of two years ago when we just couldn’t get over that hump. There’s just something to be said about experience in a varsity basketball game, and we were lacking that.”

Coletti said while he wasn’t able to accomplish as many wins as he would have liked at Ephrata, he feels he and his staff did have some success in turning the program around and putting it in nice position for success in the future.

“I do feel we made some strides,” he said. “It’s not disappointing to me by any means. When we took over, the program hadn’t won in quite a while. I feel the atmosphere in the gym is 100 percent better than it was before I came. Two years ago we were 11-11, which was the first non-losing season in 10 years. There are some players coming up through the middle school level who are going to be good and they are dedicated to basketball. The numbers are great there. Our (varsity) numbers hurt us this year which led to not so many wins but I don’t think of it as disappointing at all. I think the coaching staff accomplished a lot at Ephrata.”

While he has parted ways with Ephrata, the Lebanon native said he plans to continue coaching and hopes to return to the sidelines in the near future.

“Oh yeah, I’m absolutely going to continue to coach,” he said. “I want to be a head coach in the future. But like I said, you just know when it’s time to move on to something else and I just feel we put in a lot of time, the coaching staff and myself. We’ve made tremendous strides. The wins weren’t there this year but if you look at our roster, out of the 14 kids that we played, 11 of them are sophomores or freshmen. You are just not going to win a ton of games playing Section One or Section Two teams with freshmen and sophomores. We took a step backwards as far as wins go, but there is a lot of experience with the kids coming back. I just felt in the best interest of myself, it was time to move on.”